Picnic in Provence (29 page)

There’s reason enough to be paranoid. Renegade truffle hunters often search on private land. Theft is common, and profitable. Depending on the year, a kilo of truffles sells for six hundred or seven hundred euros; it can be a thousand or twelve hundred around Christmas, when demand is high. It’s impossible to secure the land without having someone complain that his grandfather’s grandfather used to hunt wild boar on the property. And by
complain,
I mean “ram his jeep through your newly constructed barbed-wire fence.”

The dogs moved along, having a rather successful run. Twenty minutes in, they had already found a small handful of truffles. The truffles were irregular in shape, like nuggets of black gold.

“You see that patch there, with no grass. We don’t know exactly why, maybe the truffle produces a certain chemical or just uses all the nutrients in the ground, but you often find truffles in areas where there
should
be grass, but there’s not. It’s what
les anciens
called a witch’s circle. They associated truffles with sorcery—black magic.”

On the way back to the house, Johann walked us through his small vineyard and another olive grove. He stopped to show us a bird’s nest he’d found in one of the trees.

When we got inside, Lisa, her boots very clean indeed, took over. I was looking forward to the tasting portion of the tour, because my only previous experience cooking with truffles had been underwhelming.

Our first winter in Céreste, I went with an Irish friend to a local truffle festival. Then, with much pomp and circumstance, I organized a dinner party where every course had something to do with truffles. My champagne cocktails with truffle sugar syrup were a nice twist, but my rabbit breast stuffed with truffle ricotta and spinach didn’t taste of truffles at all, and my truffle mashed potatoes were nothing special—maybe I didn’t add enough? The only real success of the evening was poached pears with truffle crème anglaise. I let the shaved truffle infuse in the cream for a day before I served it. The morning after the party, I found Gwendal, in a violation of French protocol, eating the leftovers straight out of the open fridge.

“Truffles are best with a little salt and a little fat,” said Lisa, passing around a silver tray of small white toasts spread with salted butter and topped with generous slices of truffle. “We first tasted truffles this way at Jean-Marc’s birthday party. A piece of advice: If you ever get invited to a truffle hunter’s birthday party,
go
.”

I took a nibble. The truffle had bite, density. I was surprised—maybe I’d never tasted a slice this thick. Perhaps I had made my truffle meal unnecessarily complicated.

“You can cook truffles,” said Johann, “but it’s best to hide them, protect them. I’ve had them in puff pastry—like an apple turnover, but with ham and cheese, and the truffle in the middle.”

After the other couple left, we were invited to stay for truffle burgers and fries—an impossible invitation to pass up if there ever was one. Lisa’s recipe is a home cook’s take on Daniel Boulud’s $140 restaurant creation: a center of truffle and foie gras surrounded by ground beef. She and I had an instant, easy rapport. That nice American
click
that feels so great after the careful effort of French friendships.

While Lisa prepared lunch, I took it upon myself to smell each and every truffle we’d found that morning. Some were sweet and firm, and some smelled more of vinegar—maybe they were under-ripe. Some were grassy, herblike. There were mineral elements—quartz and slate. As I went through the pile, the associations mounted. Did I smell pine needles? Blueberries? The more I sniffed, the weirder it became. What did that sweet starchy smell remind me of?
That’s it
—the beginning of a good rice pudding.

Lisa was cleaning the truffles with what looked like a boot brush, and as she massaged gently, the chocolate-colored soil gave way to cratered geological black; the truffle looked like a tiny meteor. We would have to choose a few to take home for our ice cream tests. If we could get the truffle to really infuse into the raw milk, we might even be able to make a limited edition for the shop.

“You can keep them for a couple of days in the fridge if you put them in a container with a paper towel on the bottom to absorb the condensation. You can also put eggs in with your truffle—the smell goes right through the shell. Or rice—that absorbs the moisture, and it makes the most incredible risotto.”

“I’m trying that as soon as I get home.”

While Lisa scrubbed yet more truffles to top our burgers, she told me a bit about the family history. “Johann’s grandfather joined the Résistance in Paris. He escaped and rode all the way to the Alps on a bicycle with a wooden seat.” That seemed to me an act of patriotic endurance in and of itself.

“His mother stalled the police with soup. The policemen sat down at the table to wait, and after a while, they were losing patience: ‘Where are your sons?’

“‘They’ll be along any minute,’ she said, setting the appropriate number of places at the table. ‘
C’est la guerre.
Do you think I would put out soup for people who are not coming to eat it!’ Meanwhile, her husband and two boys were hotfooting it out of town.”

There are people all over France living with this history, with these tiny accidents that made the future possible. For Johann, it is simply a family story. For me, it still feels like magic.

S
nails for breakfast. Barcelona is my kind of town.

A few weeks before the opening, Gwendal and I decided to steal a weekend together. We needed time. Time to talk. Time to do what grown-ups do in hotel rooms when there’s not a three-year-old in the next room. Neither of us are yellers; when I take even the slightest tone, Gwendal shuts up like an oyster. We are both easily wounded. But there was no denying that in the past few weeks, there had been the occasional sarcastic nip. Gwendal was thinking of printing some new business cards for me: Critic in Chief. I’d heard these whisperings over and over again: Going into business with your spouse is asking for trouble. Along with calls about deliveries and hazelnut paste, we’d gotten a number of worrying calls in the last few months. A close friend was having a tumor removed. Another was spending the weekend in Paris “taking a break” from his long-term companion and newborn daughter. Another came home from work to find his wife had rented an apartment in the next town over and moved out, saying nothing to him or their three children.

Alexandre, Gwendal, and I took the train to Paris all together; Alexandre was spending the weekend with Nicole. After lunch and a last-minute check for passports, we were ready to leave for the airport.

“I love you, sweet Boo,” I said, bending to give him a hug and a kiss.

“I
not
love you too.” He frowned, turning his attention back to his coloring book. This kind of comment doesn’t panic me anymore. At least he was being clear about his feelings. I knew it wasn’t a life sentence without parole. I think he could sense that Mommy and Daddy needed some alone time—and he was having none of it.

Gwendal and I travel well together. I always thought it was curious that the honeymoon comes after the wedding, because the way a person travels gives you a lifetime of information. Are you married to someone who makes a written checklist of all the sights he needs to see and who ticks them off one by one with grim satisfaction? Ten years later, woe unto you if you come home from the supermarket with the wrong brand of toilet paper.

Our travel philosophy consists largely of walking and eating. We wander in and out of churches and gardens, stop at cafés, drink a lot of coffee, study the local pastries.

On our last evening in Barcelona, we ate down by the port: sea snails and baby squid, razor clams and barnacles, langoustine and paella. I sucked the garlic and olive oil off my fingers and saved one of the spiky sea-snail shells for Alexandre. We got up to leave; our waiter helped me into my coat and then took my hands between his own. This was clearly his life’s work, an almost holy mission, to surprise and delight and then send his patrons, fuller and wiser, back out into the night.

The world was slightly fuzzy around the edges from the wine, a Luis Cañas Rioja 2003. My husband is a cheap date. I can think of exactly two occasions when we’ve managed to finish a bottle of wine between us, and this was one of them. I love this about him; he gets silly and amorous. We walked back through the empty streets. After a meal like that I feel like we can conquer the world. I feel ready for anything.

WHEN WE STOPPED
by Angela and Rod’s on Monday morning, the normally tranquil courtyard of the B&B looked like an Ikea storage depot. Wooden pallets were stacked with shrink-wrapped boxes as high as the ice cream truck—which we still hadn’t found an appropriate spot for. Another two weeks and Angela was going to plant some geraniums in the front seat. I looked down at the vacuum-packed slices of cured ham we had brought back from Spain; it suddenly seemed a very small gift for their saint-like handling of the mess. Maybe we should have brought back two of those plastic halos with the flashing lights, the kind they use in the religious processions.

Angela came down the spiral staircase in jeans, well-oiled leather boots, a starched white blouse, and a turquoise cashmere sweater.

“I saw the courtyard,” I said, with an apologetic half smile.

“Really?” she answered with perfect equanimity. “I haven’t seen it in weeks.”

It’s possible that Rod and Angela are losing patience with the kids. Particularly as we are someone else’s kids, and technically not their problem. Yet somehow, here we are, making a racket in their basement, squatting on their sofa, abusing their coffee machine, calling at all hours to complain about stuff they can’t possibly fix. We stopped short of raiding the liquor cabinet.

Come to think of it, we’ve done that too.

Their inherent Englishness, combined with their incredible patience, generosity, and goodwill, makes it difficult to tell when you are about to fall off the edge of the politeness cliff and into the abyss. I am still a big American bull in the china shop, bolting through the aisles, trying not to knock anything over.

So far, we had gotten by with humor. For Christmas, I’d ordered the four of us Scaramouche aprons emblazoned with the slogan
Adventures in Ice Cream.
I’d also ordered a small stuffed toy in the shape of an ice cream cone.

“But we said no gifts,” protested Angela.

“It’s not a gift,” I countered, “it’s an anger-management tool. If Gwendal and I get out of line—and sometimes we are running so fast, we don’t know when we are getting out of line—you just bop one of us, or both of us, over the head with the stuffed ice cream cone.”

Angela looked down at the toy.

“I know,” I said. “I tried to find a bigger one.”

ALEXANDRE FELL ASLEEP
on the floor in his plastic playhouse tonight, his baby doll wrapped carefully in the blanket beside him. Gwendal lifted the plastic house, and I lifted Alexandre. He was deadweight, not waking. I still love to carry my son when he’s sleeping, but I no longer feel like I’m stealing a desperately needed hug. I am simply doing what a million mothers have done before me, tucking the covers around his chin and kissing him on the forehead. He rolled over and buried his nose in a stuffed koala.

I DON’T REMEMBER
hearing an announcement on the news this morning, but apparently France has decided to suspend the Napoleonic Code and install Murphy’s Law in its place.

Fortunately, Gwendal and I worry in different ways. I like to worry about things that might happen twenty years in the future, like if Alexandre will inherit my hatred of algebra or what kind of hat I might wear to his wedding. Gwendal can only worry from two minutes to approximately six weeks in advance. He goes postal when he can’t find his keys.

I prefer to worry about things I can do absolutely nothing about. Gwendal is a solution-oriented individual and worries only about problems that have imminent resolutions, preferably ones he can oversee all by himself. This means we often have opposing definitions of an emergency, and, thankfully, we almost never hit the panic button at exactly the same time.

The town was building a traffic circle to give access to the new parking lot of the laboratory, and as a result, the main electricity line would have to be moved. The laboratory was due to be finished between April 3 and April 8—three weeks behind schedule. Until then, there was no electricity, and, worse, because of the position of the building, all the wastewater had to be pumped, so no electricity also meant no sewers. We had a three-ton ice cream turbine and a cold-storage room, not to mention an air-conditioning system due to arrive next week, and we had no way to test them. Until the main electricity line was installed, we were off the grid, which meant we couldn’t even arrange to put in our own electricity line—EDF, the French power company, couldn’t possibly make an appointment to come to a building that didn’t exist (add another ten days). All this was inching us toward the busy holiday weekends of the first and the eighth of May—an opening boost our business plan simply couldn’t afford to miss. We had an employee starting on April 8 and no lab for her to work in. There was also the fact that it had been raining for four days straight, and the construction site was as muddy as a pig trough. We were both wide awake at 3:00 a.m., Gwendal rubbing his hands obsessively back and forth across his scalp. I saw our leaky pirate ship slowly sinking into the waves.
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
yo-ho-ho and a bottle of pastis
.

And then something curious happened. Twenty-four hours later, it was all solved. Gwendal met with the landlord in the morning, found the plumber early in the afternoon; the mayor would call to see if the electric company could install a temporary line. The interconnectedness, the proximity, the fact that everyone’s success is so closely linked—all this makes for comparatively speedy solutions. In Paris, if you lose the plumber, you lose the plumber. He can avoid you for months. Here, it’s like a benevolent mafia:
We know where you live
. Better still:
We know where you drink your morning coffee.

I GOT THE
call a little after eight in the morning. Gwendal was at our newly finished lab, hysterical. “There was a mouse in here last night.”

We are opening in one week. Seven days. This is just what we need. Apparently, this clever rodent got into the chocolate, went straight for the good stuff. If he’s dead, he must have died of pleasure. I rushed down to the lab, thinking of a thousand euros’ worth of vanilla beans. Our shiny packets of 68 percent cacao grand cru chocolate from the Dominican Republic stacked like gold ingots. I pictured an extremely acrobatic mouse, pure Cirque du Soleil, doing a triple pike straight into our twenty-kilo bin of sugar.

We spent the morning disinfecting the place from top to bottom. My parents are back in town for the opening. I sent them to the French equivalent of the dollar store to buy huge transparent storage bins, and we spent the afternoon arranging them. For once, my mother’s obsession with sealed plastic containers seemed perfectly reasonable.

DID YOU EVER
see ice cream make a grown man cry? I have. Today. The vanilla is overchurned—bits of ice and fat molecules clumped up into tiny grains of sand. The last time this happened was in September—months of experience and experiments ago. Gwendal was so upset, he had to go to bed and sleep it off. Meanwhile Paul and I took a trip to the local cemetery—the closest place with the tools to cut three inches off our new marble counter. I stood among the sample headstones, resisting the urge to tap my foot.

“Une semaine,”
said the woman behind the desk.

“A week!” I screeched. “It’s just one cut.” She stared at me blankly. I could read her thoughts:
Most of our clients, madame, have eternity.

I took a deep breath.
Remember where you are, Elizabeth. This is France; nothing can be done last-minute.
Or perhaps there’s a broader point to be made: We’re opening in six days—this
is
the last minute.

SO THIS IS
what one hundred kilos of strawberries looks like: more than a bathtub, less than a swimming pool. When we arrived to pick them up at the farm, they were still warm from the sun. Our new professional juicer arrived yesterday. So we should be able to cut off the stems, juice the berries, and vacuum-pack the result for a whole summer’s use.

The road to the strawberry farm was magnificent, lined with cherry trees in full flower. Red earth, blue sky, and, in between, the shimmering movement of millions of white blossoms shaking softly in the breeze. The strawberry man was, as Angela would put it, “a thinking woman’s crumpet”—late twenties with a dark crew cut, tanned shoulders, and firm but not gaudy muscles on display in a dusty green tank top. I had a brief image of some kind of calendar: Sexy Farmers of Provence. Hello, Mr. May. He had been on his hands and knees since 6:00 a.m., gathering our order straight from the fields. I tasted one. If this doesn’t make the world’s most outstanding strawberry sorbet, I’ll eat my espadrilles. Berthillon, here we come.

WE WERE IN
the lab till two in the morning decapitating strawberries, listening to the sound track from
Rent. How we gonna pay, how we gonna pay, this year’s rent, next year’s rent?

When we got back, the light in my parents’ room was still on. I poked my head in. “What are you doing up?”

“We were waiting up to see that you got home okay.”

“Mom, we weren’t on a date—we’re married now. Anyway, the last time you waited up for me after a date, I came home at nine a.m.”

“I remember it well.”

“I THINK IT’S
perfect,” I said, licking our latest strawberry ice cream test off my spoon.

“It’s an upstanding citizen,” said Gwendal. Where does he pick up these English expressions?

“I’m just saying,” I said, quoting my maternal grandmother, “you wouldn’t kick it out of bed for eating crackers.” Let him add that one to his repertoire.

Turns out there are cultural differences even in ice cream. Gwendal thinks our freshly churned strawberry ice cream doesn’t have enough fruit to bear that name; I think it’s heavenly. Apparently the French like their strawberry in the form of a hot-pink sorbet. I prefer this, dense and creamy. The taste of the raw milk—even after a whirl in the pasteurizer—really comes through. I’d like to congratulate the cows. The color is the faintest blush of pink studded with chunks of ripe red strawberry that resist under your teeth. Must contain my American urge for unilateral action. We’ll make both.

I WOKE UP
with a strawberry hangover. I must not be as young as I used to be. I need to order more plastic hats, or was it plastic tubs? Should the shopping bags have purple polka dots or purple stripes? I think I’ll go with the stripes, in honor of Henri Bendel. Bed. Miss my bed. They’re predicting rain right up until the opening and beyond. I had a dream last night where my teeth were falling out. That’s chaos theory, right?

I was locked away in Gwendal’s office translating the menu when Paul came upstairs. “There’s a man outside. He said something like ‘inspector’ and ‘Scaramouche.’ He’s wearing a dark blue jumpsuit. It looks very official.”